A most unpleasant couple of days in which the world seemed blacker than normal.
At work on Wednesday night, a dark series of squiggles surfaced in my left eye vision, making the job rather difficult and putting a strain on the other mince pie.
So, this morning it was off to the specialist who pronounced a torn retina and proceeded to blast the eyeball with laser beams.
Apparently it’s a fairly common complaint for middle-aged, short-sighted people.
Very uncomfortable and although the bleeding has stopped, I’ll have cloudy vision until the remaining blood dissapates. Like waiting for a bruise to heal, the medico said.
In the meantime, I’ve got a headache that could be photographed. So not much blogging for a few days.
And bugger me if the Midland photoshop hasn’t nailed matters perfectly.

That enemy of all that is iniquitous and incompetent in the news — so long as it’s not the leftwing side of news — Media Watch, claims this is not plagiarism.
Laugh … I thought I’d bust a gasket!

New Yorker: “The favoured epithet among interns and residents is GOMER, which stands for Get Out of My Emergency Room”Philip Adams: “Interns and residents in the US brand them with the epithet GOMER, which stands for Get Out of My Emergency Room”

New Yorker: “Conventional medical wisdom holds that hypochondria is a hopeless condition and should be treated by ignoring it”
Philip Adams: “The general medical attitude is that hypochondria is time-wasting
nonsense and should be treated by ignoring it”

The Australian Broadcasting Communard has reported that US President George W Bush has outlined broad plans for the country’s return to self-rule, including the destruction of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
Welcome news, but in its intro does the ABC tell us when the jail will be demolished? Or what it will be replaced with? Does the intro give any more detail on the handover of power? No, to all three.
But those powerful intellects at the ABC — so brilliant they cling to totalitarian political philosophies that have failed everywhere they’ve been put into practice — have an important fact to impart in their news intro: In his speech, GWB mispronounced Abu Ghraib prison three times.
This is the same ABC news service that not long ago referred to Ballarat as southwest of Melbourne.
Thanks to Andrew Murphy for the tip.
UPDATE:
Apologies for not including the link earlier.
UPDATE 2:
On checking the link, I find that an editorial commissar has moved the mispronunciation jibe from the intro to paragraph 4. One small step for rationale.
Perhaps the management-approved monitoring for bias is having an effect.
UPDATE 3:
Thanks to Andrew Murphy for putting me onto Google cache search.
Here’s the original offending intro:

US President George W Bush has sought to regain support for his Iraq policies, outlining in a speech broad plans for the country’s return to self-rule, including the destruction of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which he mispronounced three times.

This is one of the scorching new titles from the Taliban Book Club. BrokenNews reports the club is open to anyone “provided they are male, Muslim, have a beard, hate Jews, hate America, hate women, animals and small children and live in a cave.”

Punchy letter in The Australian today (scanned it on the net) from a young man in the next suburb. (Omitting erroneous material in earlier post).

Fahrenheit 9/11 YOUR newspaper is to be commended for having the gumption to publish a piece critical of Michael Moore (Opinion, 24/5). The media is too often uncritical of his claims.
The author, Jim Nolan, is absolutely correct to say Moore’s claim that Disney is suddenly trying to censor him is a lie. Moore admitted in an interview on CNN that he had known for a full year that Disney had no intention of distributing the film. Now Moore is claiming that the White House is stopping Mel Gibson’s company from picking up the film. Gibson’s company naturally denies this. Early reviews from Cannes indicate that Moore’s new film repeats from his last book many claims that have already been debunked by such fact-checking sites as mooreexposed.com and spinsanity.org. The latter site is run by people who share Moore’s political position but care about facts more than message.The film claims the White House secretly flew bin Laden family members out of the US while flights were still grounded after 9/11. The bipartisan commission investigating 9/11, whose members include people who are no friends of Bush, has thoroughly investigated this claim and found it to hold no water.Michael A. Bright
Herne Hill, Vic

You are highly unlikely to read this in the Fairfax press.It would be expected that if Karpinski were a man, he would have taken those demands like a man. But Karpinski is not and so has not. She has taken them like a woman – whining, making excuses, and complaining that it’s not her fault, that she’s being “scapegoated.”
I am waiting for feminists, or any woman who is simply proud of being female, to denounce Janis Karpinski as reinforcing the negative stereotype of women unable to accept responsibility, and humiliating her gender worse than were the Abu Ghraib prisoners under her jurisdiction.

Celiberal is your one-stop shop for displays of astonishing hypocrisy and stupidity.

“Have we gone to war yet? We (expletive) deserve to get bombed. Bring it on.”
“Let’s get rid of all the economic (expletive) this country represents! Bring it on, I hope the Muslims win!”
— Chrissie Hynde

“My daughter is four, my boy is one. I’d like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out.”
— Johnny Depp

In response to 9/11:
“Yes this is all wonderful news, it is time that the f*cking Jews get their heads kicked in. It’s time to finish off the US once and for all.”
“I was happy, could not really believe what has happened. I just cant be crying about the US , you know ..All the crimes the US is committing all over the world. This just shows, what goes around, that comes around even to the United States. Thats what happened tonight, what goes around comes around even to the United States.”
— Bobby Fischer

“This is a racist and imperialist war. The warmongers who stole the White House (you call them ‘hawks’, but I would never disparage such a fine bird) have hijacked a nation’s grief and turned it into a perpetual war on any non-white country they choose to describe as terrorist.”
— Woody Harrelson

“I think George Bush is such an embarrassment to America in the way that he doesn’t take the rest of the world into consideration.
“And it all seems to be for him and his friends to keep getting richer at the expense of a nation, at the expense of the environment. It’s like a full scale assault on the environment.”
— Gwyneth Paltrow

“It’d be different if he was staring somebody down with a loaded gun in his hand. But there doesn’t seem to be any indications whatsoever that this man [Hussein] poses an immediate threat to anybody.”
— Richard Gere

This is what talent-challenged old bag Madonna said in an email to fans in January:

“I am writing to you because the future I wish for my children is at risk. Our greatest risk is not terrorism and it’s not Iraq or the ‘Axis of Evil.’ Our greatest risk is a lack of leadership, a lack of honesty and a complete lack of consciousness.”

MADONNA has axed three gigs in Israel — after terrorists threatened to kill her and her kids.
The singer was terrified by a blitz of poison-pen letters.
Madge “freaked out” when she learned of a terrorist plot to kill her two young children if she performed in Israel.
She first planned to defy the extremists but cancelled after the unnamed Palestinian group mentioned details about Lourdes, seven, and three-year-old Rocco in a series of threatening letters.

Is this the smoking gun that could lead to revelation of those pesky, elusive WMDs?
The Wall Street Journal reported April 29 that Jordanian authorities say the death toll from a bomb and poison-gas attack they foiled could have reached 80,000.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al Qaeda’s man in Iraq before Saddam’s fall, was believed to be behind the plot — al Qaeda’s first ever attempt to use chemical weapons. The targets included the U.S. Embassy in Amman.Jordan’s King Abdullah called it a “major, major operation” that would have “decapitated” his government. “Anyone who doubts the terrorists’ desire to obtain and use these weapons only needs to look at this example,” said Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
More details of the plot emerged Monday night with the dramatic broadcast on Jordanian television of confessions from the terror cell’s leader and associates. The idea apparently was to crash trucks–fitted with special battering rams and filled with some 20 tons of explosives–through the gates of targets that included the U.S. Embassy, the Jordanian Prime Minister’s office and the national intelligence headquarters. The explosions notwithstanding, the real damage was reportedly to come from dispersing a toxic cloud of chemicals, which included nerve and blister agents.
Little has been reported on the foiled attack since, most of the western media having long ago decided WMDs were non-existent. Besides, the media had the jailhouse “torture” story to overkill.
But no one is disputing that the terrorists possessed nerve and blister agents to use in bombs.
Could the Bush admin be sitting on a totally unexpected discovery they plan to reveal closer to the election?

Jordan recently seized 20 tons of chemicals trucked in by confessed al Qaeda members who brought the stuff in from Syria. The chemicals included VX, Sarin and 70 others. But the media seems curiously incurious about whether one could reasonably trace this stuff back to Iraq. Had the terrorists released a “toxic cloud,” Jordanian officials say 80,000 would have died!
So, I interviewed terrorism expert John Loftus, who once held some of the highest security clearances in the world. Loftus, a former Army officer, served as a Justice Department prosecutor. He investigated CIA cases of Nazi war criminals for the U.S. attorney general. Author of several books, Loftus once received a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
John Loftus: There’s a lot of reason to think (the source of the chemicals) might be Iraq. We captured Iraqi members of al Qaeda, who’ve been trained in Iraq, planned for the mission in Iraq, and now they’re in Jordan with nerve gas. That’s not the kind of thing you buy in a grocery store. You have to have obtained it from someplace.

Even the once redoubtable Times is downplaying its heroes’ achievements. Attacked by a mob of Shia militiamen in southern Iraq at the weekend, troops from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment fought back fiercely, leaving 28 al-Mahdi Army dead and two Brits injured.
Yet The Times (registration required) leads with “backlash feared” and unsubstantiated claims that Iraqi troops were mutilated:Al-Sadr followers exploited the allegations of mutilation, which were aired on al-Arabiya television. A relative of one of the dead claimed the fighter’s body was missing his arms and head. Another was alleged to have had his genitals cut. Akram al-Kabi, a member of Sadr’s group, told al-Jazeera television that among the dead were peaceful demonstrators. He said that bodies recovered had limbs missing and eyes gouged out.

The very last sentence explains the “mutilations”. Makes you wonder what sort of monkeys they have for sub-editors:

The soldiers engaged al-Mahdi fighters for at least four hours, using fixed bayonets and engaging in hand-to-hand fighting.

If it was all about oil and the allies won, why does it look like I’ll be paying close to $1.10 a litre by next week?SINGAPORE (Reuters) – U.S. light crude futures (CLc1) struck a new all-time record in electronic trading on Monday on worries that global supplies will strain to meet soaring demand.
The market tipped an intraday peak at $41.59 a barrel in electronic ACCESS dealings, surpassing Friday’s peak at $41.56 during floor trading in New York.
Prices have pushed to their highest levels since U.S. crude futures were launched in 1983 by fears that world supplies may be hard pressed to meet surging oil demand, which has been driven by healthy global economic growth, especially in the United States and China.
Oil markets are also concerned of possible sabotage attacks on vital oil infrastructure in the Middle East, home to two-thirds of global reserves, which would further test supplies.

Gawd, I hope policy buffoons from the Socialist Lunatics Republic of Victoria don’t get wind of this:A few days of close study by business leaders revealed that ethnic-loving CRE was imposing on every British employer an obligation to provide a special `prayer room’ and paid religious holidays for any workers feeling they needed such provisions; and employers were told that if they had no ethnics on their payroll, they must consider employing even dullard applicants lacking the required qualifications. Employment Tribunals would be obliged to enforce on employers these shameful demands by the CRE for `positive discrimination’ (aka affirmative racism).
{Not to be outdone, Americans with psychological disabilities such as Attention Deficit Disorder, Asperger’s Syndrome and Bipolar Disorder began demanding that the world tolerate and even compensate them for their handicaps – thus achieving a new peecee goal of `neurodiversity’ (New York Times, 9 v). Ten years ago it used to be joked that PeeCee would culminate in beautiful girls and amply-tackled men being required to mutilate themselves so as to achieve the ideal of equality – the joke being intended to ridicule PeeCee. But with the dyslexic (and doubtless other disabled) now being given extra time in `university’ examinations, the fantasies of modern egalitarians are increasingly foisted on the world’.
From PC Watch.

The Sunday blats’ letters columns are chokka with anguished outrage about the evil, cruel US prison guards in Iraq. Still. The same torment is not expressed for Nicholas Berg or the murdered Israeli mother and her five children. Seems they don’t feel too strongly either about the slaughter of an estimated 600 Christians this week in Nigeria.“Hundreds of people were killed,” said Christian leader Mark Amani. “Some corpses were burned in wells. Even little children were killed.
“The bodies of pregnant women were ripped open and their bodies burned,” he said.
Now, that’s an atrocity.

It would be refreshing for once to see a mainstream media piece telling the other story about Iraq. It’s not scandalous, it doesn’t paint the coalition in a bad light and it’s about far more Iraqis than a few gangs of extremist thugs.
Regrettably, the mainstream media is unwilling or incapable of diverse coverage of the Iraq situation, so we must rely on blogs such as Iraq the Model for reports from the other side.Last time I was surprised to see a new water treatment plant (or the so called RO in the south) near the river distributing clean water for the whole town for free, with four brand-new automobile tanks to deliver water to the remote villages twice a day. Everyone is grateful there as our major health problems are caused by polluted water. Now, this new processing plant will help rid the city of many health problems.
In my very last trip, the special new thing was a campaign to renew the doctors’ residency that we-12 doctors-live in and a decent temporary place is provided for us until the old miserable residency is fully rehabilitated.
The other new foundation that is being constructed now is an Internet Center. Who would dream to see Internet service available in a southern village? This is more than a dream coming true, it makes me feel proud and it makes people believe more and more that the change is in their interest.
Read it all, and the comments. Illuminating.

It’s reassuring to know that obese cross-dressers who sleep with their mothers will have a voice at the upcoming US Democrats convention.
CINCINNATI (AP) – Ohio Democrats have chosen talk-show host Jerry Springer to be an at-large delegate for the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

You can take the would-be Talibubba out of Adelaide but you can’t take Adelaide out of….The spokesman says Mr Hicks wanted to know how the Adelaide Crows were performing.

Must be the Adelaide water that makes drongoes even dopier. Footy broadcasting goose Rex Hunt was taken into custody by Australian Protective Service officers and Australian Federal Police after carrying 10 steel forks on to Qantas flight 676 from Adelaide to Melbourne.
In flight, Hunt, a former police officer, is alleged to have told other passengers he had smuggled metal implements on to the plane that left Adelaide at 9.10am and touched down in Melbourne at 10.45am.
A fellow passenger notified flight attendants that Hunt had produced several steel implements and the captain radioed for police to be waiting in Melbourne.
As a broadcaster Hunt is an acquired taste and with a new sports radio station in Melbourne and increased competition from pay TV coverage, the former VFL ruckman obviously needs the profile polished a tad.
Well, he’s achieved that with rival radio news services only too happy to tell listeners about the idiot’s antics.

Piers Morgan was sacked as the editor of the US-hating Daily Mirror last night as the newspaper’s board made an unreserved apology for publishing fake pictures of British troops torturing Iraqi prisoners.
Col David Black, a former commanding officer of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, whose soldiers were accused of torture and abuse in the Mirror under the headline “Vile”, said: “It is time the ego of an editor is measured against the life of a soldier.”
Col Black told a press conference: “These photographs are a recruiting poster for al-Qa’eda and every other terrorist organisation. They have made the lives of our Armed Forces in Iraq that much more difficult and dangerous.”
Meanwhile, another left-leaning rag, the Boston Globe, has no intention of sacking anyone after reporting claims that US-made porn pictures it published were shots of US servicemen gang-raping Iraqi women.
“There was a lapse in judgments and procedures, and we apologize for it,” said Globe Editor Martin Baron. The graphic nature of the photos and their lack of authentication made them unsuitable for publication, he said.
Notice how it’s media outlets known for blatant bias that have been tripped up by untruths: The New York Times with Jayson Blair’s inventions and Maureen Dowd’s manufactured quotes (scroll down); the Chicago Tribune whose correspondent Uli Schmetzer invented an Australian psychiatrist to disparage Redfern Aborigines; and CNN which ran a report describing Victorian regional city Colac as an outback town of 500.
Seems that when you view matters through an ideological filter, you’re more inclined to believe what suits your position. That’s no way to present news and a sure fire way to get duped by political opportunists.